11 France sent envoys to negotiate with Pétion and Christophe. French agents suggested to Pétion that Haiti be put back under the control of France (Dubois, Aftershocks: 79). Former French colonists argued for some kind of return to French rule as late as 1825, the year of France’s recognition of Haitian independence. See, for example, the anonymous text De Saint-Domingue. Moyen facile d’augmenter l’indemnité due aux colons de Saint-Domingue expropriés (Paris: Imprimerie de Goetschy, 1825).
12 Under Boyer, the Haitian government encouraged African American emigration; in the mid-1820s, the government subsidized the travel of six thousand African Americans to Haiti (Dubois, Aftershocks: 93–94).
13 The writings of the man charged with negotiating the indemnity were republished in 2006. See Gaspard Théodore Mollien, Haïti ou Saint-Domingue (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006) and Mœurs d’Haïti (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).
14 After the 2010 earthquake, several French intellectuals called for France to reimburse Haiti. See, for example, “Un appel pour que la France rembourse à Haïti la dette de son indépendance,” Le Monde (August 16, 2010).
15 In fact, Haiti was originally ordered to pay 150 million francs in gold, although that figure was reduced to 60 million in 1838, when French recognition became official. Furthermore, as a condition of recognition in 1825, the import and export fees levied on French ships and goods in Haiti were ordered at half of all other nations’ fees. While it is difficult to estimate how much money this would equate to in the twenty-first century, the figures run into the billions of dollars. See Joseph Saint-Rémy, Mémoires du général Toussaint L’Ouverture (Paris: Pagnerre, 1853): 138–139; Jean-François Brière, Haïti et la France: le rêve brisé (Paris: Karthala, 2008); and François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et la France (1825–1922) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).
16 Dumesle was related to Rivière-Hérard, who eventually succeeded Boyer as president of the Republic. Both Dumesle and Rivière-Hérard ended their lives in exile in Jamaica. See Dubois, Aftershocks: 122–133, as well as Matthew J. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
17 From 1844 to 1848, the separate state that had been led by Goman earlier in the century was reestablished by the Piquets. See Michel Hector, “Les deux grandes rebellions paysannes de la première moitié du XIXe siècle haïtien,” in Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française, ed. Yves Bénot and Marcel Dorigny (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003): 179–199, and David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, revised ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996): passim.
18 Guerrier and Riché were both over eighty years old when they became president. Beaubrun Ardouin served on the powerful Council of Secretaries of State, which was established in 1843 after the presidential term was set at four years, during the Guerrier administration, while his brother Céligny Ardouin served on it under Riché. For more on the complicated “politique de doublure” in Haiti, see Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier.
19 See Justin Bouzon, Etudes historiques sur la présidence de Faustin Soulouque (Port-au-Prince: Bibilothèque haïtienne, 1894).
20 Slavery was officially abolished in the U.S. in 1865, in the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1873 and 1886, and in the Empire of Brazil in 1888.
21 See David Luis-Brown, “Slave Rebellion and the Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a Neglected Cuban Antislavery Novel by Orihuela,” Atlantic Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 209–230; Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1999); Michele Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
22 Hénock Trouillot, Beaubrun Ardouin, l’homme politique et l’historien (Port-au-Prince: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, Comisión de Historia, 1950): 29–31.
23 However, many of their members were executed before news of abolition reached Paris in the winter of 1793–1794. Jacques-Pierre Brissot laments in his letters from prison, written in late 1793, that “all our efforts” could not break free the “unfortunate” slaves (excerpt from Brissot’s Papiers inédits: Archives Nationales, 446 AP 15).
24 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet published Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres with the Société Typographique in Neufchâtel under the pseudonym M. Schwarz in 1781.
25 In 1790, the colonist Jean-Baptiste Mosneron, heavily invested in the slave trade, warned against allowing these new revolutionary laws to extend beyond French borders in his Discours sur les colonies et la traite des noirs, prononcé le 26 février 1790 par M. Mosneron de l’Aunay, député du Commerce de Nantes près de l’Assemblée Nationale, à la Société des Amis de la Constitution (s.l.n.d.): 9–10.
26 See Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (February 2006): 1–14.
27 The proslavery Club Massiac, whose members included some of Saint-Domingue’s absentee planters, formed an influential political block that tried to halt any laws extending universal rights to people of African descent. Nonetheless, in 1791, the National Assembly officially stated that gens de couleur were entitled to the same rights as all French citizens. However, this was not an easy law to implement in a time of such upheaval and in a colony so far from Paris.
28 See Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 29, and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New Word: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005): 102. There is some mystery surrounding the exact dates of and participants in this ceremony. Both Dayan and Dubois highlight the importance of the symbolic power of the Bois Caïman story.
29 Indications of Bergeaud’s political views, such as his support for Ogé and Chavannes and his dislike of Louverture’s policies have, over the years, contributed to the controversial